John Alexander Vincent Bates (1918-1993) was an English neurophysiologist based at the

National Hospital for Nervous Diseases The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (informally the National Hospital or Queen Square) is a neurological hospital in Queen Square, London. It is part of the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. It was the f ...

from 1946 until his retirement.P. W. Nathan
John Alexander Vincent Bates
, ''

Munk's Roll The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, commonly referred to as Munk's Roll, is a series of published works containing biographical entries of the fellows of the Royal College of Physicians. It was published in print in eleven volum ...

'', Vol. IX, p.32 He became the chief electroencephalographer at the hospital, studying human EEG in relation to voluntary movement. In 1949, he founded the

Ratio Club The Ratio Club was a small British informal dining club from 1949 to 1958 of young psychiatrists, psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians and engineers who met to discuss issues in cybernetics., p. 95. History The idea of the club arose ...

, a dining club of British scientists interested in

cybernetics Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causal processes such as feedback and recursion, where the effects of a system's actions (its outputs) return as inputs to that system, influencing subsequent action. It is concerned with ...

. Phil Husbands and Owen Holland
The Ratio Club: A Hub of British Cybernetics
in Husbands, Holland & Wheeler (eds.) ''The Mechanical Mind in History'', MIT Press, 91-148, 2008. Papers relating to Bates and the Ratio Club are held at the

Wellcome Library The Wellcome Library is a free library and Museum based in central London. It was developed from the collection formed by Sir Henry Wellcome (1853–1936), whose personal wealth allowed him to create one of the most ambitious collections of the ...

.Bates, John A. V., and the Ratio Club
/ref>

References

1918 births 1993 deaths English neuroscientists Neurophysiologists {{neuroscientist-stub